Your Brain Wants You To Help The Poor. Are You Listening?

In a paper in Nature; the authors Tricomi, Rangel, Camerer, and O’Doherty used fMRI experiments to reveal that the brain is wired for egalitarianism.

Activity rose in rich people when their poor colleagues got money. In fact, it was greater in that case than when they got money themselves, which means the “rich” people’s neural activity was more egalitarian than their subjective ratings were. Whereas in “poor” people, the vmPFC and the ventral striatum only responded to getting money, not to seeing the rich getting even richer.

Notice that this is essentially a claim about psychology, not neuroscience, even though the authors used neuroimaging in this study. They started out by assuming some neuroscience – in this case, that activity in the vmPFC and the ventral striatum indicates reward i.e. pleasure or liking – and then used this to investigate psychology, in this case, the idea that people value equality per se, as opposed to the alternative idea, that “dislike for unequal outcomes could also be explained by concerns for social image or reciprocity, which do not require a direct aversion towards inequality.”

3 comments

I want underdogs to win, all else equal. If my team beats a weak opponent, I get less pleasure out of this than watching a great upset.

This is unrelated to inequality, equality, or other distributional states. Drawing the conclusion that “people like equality” despite saying that they don’t, and in the presence of this confounding tendency seems a bit silly. Maybe they address that somewhere in the paper…

James K., can you explain your bias toward the weaker opponent without it being related to distributional states? It appears to me that you are talking right past yourself, but I’ve missed something before. What else explains your preference for a win?

Josh– the difference is subtle, and rests on definitions of ‘equality’. (Admittedly, my statement that my preference has ‘nothing to do with’ distributional states is inaccurate).

In the case of football, etc. a win by an underdog means much more to the underdog than an win would mean to the favored opponent. If no underdog exists, this possibility doesn’t either. Before you discount this preference, look to the vast body of popular literature playing exactly on this theme.

More directly referencing the study, the small win means more proportionally to the poorer person. The fact that a richer person feels compassion for the poorer person and enjoys with them the larger relative win does not necessarily imply that (contrary to what the richer person has said) the richer person is genetically disposed to want everyone to have equal factor endowments. I may be splitting hairs, but this is what I understand to be the standard definition of equality in this context.